Awards:
Most Promising Newcomer, London Critics' Circle, 1995; Golden
Globe for best performance by an actress in a supporting role in a motion
picture,

Hollywood Foreign Press Association, for
The Constant Gardener,
2006; Academy Award for best performance by an actress in a supporting
role, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for
The Constant Gardener,
2006; Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a female
actor in a supporting role, for
The Constant Gardener,
2006.

Sidelights

British screen siren Rachel Weisz won her first Academy Award in 2006 for
her role in
The Constant Gardener,
the well-received adaptation of the John le Carré novel. After
just a decade in the business, she was one of the most sought-after
actresses on both sides of the Atlantic, appearing in such works as
The Mummy, About a Boy, Enemy at the Gates,
and
Runaway Jury.
With homes in Manhattan and the Primrose Hill section of London, Weisz
avoids Los Angeles, though she once attempted to settle there when her
career was just beginning. "I couldn't make a life
there," she admitted to Sean O'Hagan in London's
Observer
newspaper. "You're in a car all the time, and there are no
seasons."

Weisz, whose surname is pronounced "vice," was born on March
7, 1971, in London. Both of her parents had come to England from elsewhere
on the
Continent—her father, Georg, was a Hungarian-born inventor, and
her psychoanalyst mother, Edith, was originally from Austria. Both were
from Jewish families that had fled the Nazi German threat before World War
II. In England, Weisz's father rose to prominence as a developer of
a self-contained respirator unit and also conceived a detector for deadly
landmines. The family lived in the ritzy Hampstead area of north London,
home to a long list of illustrious residents, from Charles Dickens to
Bjork, and Weisz was sent to the prestigious St. Paul's
Girls' School in west London, where one of her classmates was
another future film star, Emily Mortimer (
Scream 3, Match Point
).

Weisz pursued a career as a catalog model in her teens. That led to her
discovery by a talent scout, who offered her a part in a planned Richard
Gere film,
King David.
Weisz's parents disagreed on whether she should take the role, and
she herself was ambivalent about it. "I didn't want to do
anything that would make me different, make people at school hate
me," she told Harriet Lane in an interview with the London
newspaper the
Observer.
In the end, she declined the offer.

Weisz's parents divorced when she was 16, and she struggled to
finish her secondary-school obligations. When she failed her exit exams,
she nearly missed her chance at a college education, but a sympathetic
teacher convinced administrators at Trinity Hall College, part of
Cambridge University, to let her enroll anyway but on a form of academic
probation. She did well once there, studying toward a degree in English,
and began performing in student theater productions. With a few friends
she took a train trip through Eastern Europe on one of their breaks,
visiting its major cities to attend the avant-garde theater performances
that were a staple of the Communist-era cultural life in the Eastern bloc.
Back in Cambridge, Weisz and her cohorts founded a theater company they
named Talking Tongues.

Weisz's first brush with professional success came when an improv
piece her group staged,
Slight Possession,
won an award at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. She recalled her
student-thespian days fondly many years later, telling Jasper Rees in the
Independent on Sunday
that the period was "probably the most exciting time I can ever
remember. It was all ours, and that's never been repeated. We did
some of the best work I've ever done, which probably about 100
people ever saw."

Not surprisingly, Weisz's parents were uneasy with her
extracurricular drama activities, and had expected her to pursue a career
in law. "They weren't skeptical," she explained to
O'Hagan in another
Observer
interview. "They just thought I was pretty crap. They saw me in my
first play and were justifi-ably underwhelmed." She graduated from
Trinity Hall after completing her dissertation on the ghost stories of
Henry James, and decided against drama school, unlike some of her
Cambridge theater friends. Hoping to break into the business right away,
"I did some TV, so I completely sold out," she told Rees in
the
Independent on Sunday.
"All my friends at Cambridge just thought I was the lowest of the
low."

Weisz did manage to land one stage role, in a 1994 drama called
The Year of the Family
at London's Fin-borough Theatre, but desperately hoped to win a
part in an upcoming production of a Noel Coward play,
Design for Living,
at the Gielgud Theatre. Finally, the well-known director agreed to see
her, but warned her agent ahead of time that she would not be cast; she
was anyway, as Gilda, one of the leads in the racy farce, and the role won
her the Most Promising Newcomer of 1995 award from the London
Critics' Circle.

Despite her seemingly effortless early success, Weisz felt adrift, she
told Suzie Mackenzie in the
Guardian.
"Not suicidal, never that, but days when I couldn't get out
of bed that kind of thing." Her psychoanalyst mother had warned her
against delving into therapy, but Weisz disobeyed and spent five years on
the couch. "It was the hardest thing I've ever done,"
she said in the same interview, but worthwhile in the end. "At last
I was able to get on with my life."

Weisz made her film debut in a little-seen action thriller called
Death Machine
in 1995, and went on to win a lead role alongside Keanu Reeves in
Chain Reaction
the following year. She and Reeves played beleaguered scientists on the
run from evil conspirators in the film, which earned largely negative
reviews—though
New York Times
critic Janet Maslin did notice that "Weisz makes a strong sidekick
for Mr. Reeves' character, even if the film doesn't give her
much to do."

Weisz fared somewhat better with her third film,
Stealing Beauty,
a 1996 Bernardo Bertolucci tale of American and British expatriates in
Tuscany. The cast included Jeremy Irons and Liv Tyler, and Weisz stole
more than one scene as a vixenish daughter of the villa. Rees, writing in
the
Independent on Sunday,
asserted that Weisz's Miranda "embodied a certain type of
Englishwoman: bored, laconic, plummy, fantastically at ease with herself,
jaded with disdain for the foreign surroundings in which she baked her
largely naked body."

Juicier film parts were offered to Weisz after that: she was cast in a
nineteenth-century romance alongside Vincent Perez in
Swept from the Sea,
and then appeared in
The Land Girls
in 1998, a World War II-era drama about a trio of women serving Britain
in uniform. Her first experience with Hollywood came when she was cast in
the hit 1999 flick
The Mummy
opposite Brendan Fraser. Weisz liked the role of Evelyn, the earnest
librarian, she told Lane in the
Observer
interview. "Evelyn's a good character," she said.
"She's not just the token girl: she has a good, meaty,
feisty role, and I thought the idea of a librarian on an adventure was
funny."

Weisz's dark hair, porcelain skin, and vintage-style beauty seemed
to make her a natural choice for period films, especially those with a
Central European flavor. She appeared with Ralph Fiennes in the Hungarian
family saga
Sunshine
in 1999, and was cast as a Russian adventuress alongside Jude Law in the
2001 siege-of-Stalingrad story
Enemy at the Gates.
She was reportedly rejected, however, for the lead in
Bridget Jones's Diary,
because the film's producers considered her too attractive to play
the title role convincingly.

Weisz reprised her Evelyn role for
The Mummy Returns
in 2001, and next appeared as a single mother who so captivates Hugh
Grant's character in
About a Boy
that he pretends to be single parent, too. Interestingly, one of the
film's two directors, Chris Weitz, had also been at Trinity Hall
when Weisz was there. Because their surnames were similar, he once
received a piece of mail in his slot that had been meant for her, which he
found absolutely thrilling, for Weisz was known as the "Trinity
Hall heartbreaker," according to the
Sunday Times
' Jeff Dawson.

After 2003's
Confidence,
in which she starred alongside Ed Burns and Dustin Hoffman, Weisz
appeared in the film version of playwright Neil LaBute's
The Shape of Things.
Two years earlier, she had appeared in both the London and New York stage
productions in the lead, as an American art student who remakes a somewhat
disheveled, introverted young man into a more appealing mate. The story
was marked by LaBute's razor-sharp dialogue delivered by characters
whose amorality is the plot's centerpiece. Weisz also served as one
of the film's producers, which was one of the reasons, she told
Sunday Times
journalist David Eimer, that she accepted such a wide range of film
roles. "If you do a big movie like
The Mummy
and it's successful, you can help finance small movies that are
more your thing," she explained. "They call them
'passion projects' in America, which sounds odd, but it
makes sense."

Weisz appeared in
Runaway Jury,
the 2003 adaptation of the John Grisham novel, with John Cusack and Gene
Hackman, before tackling another comedy, 2004's
Envy,
that teamed her with Jack Black and Ben Stiller. Revlon recruited her to
appear in its celebrity-laden ad campaigns, which put her on a roster that
included such Hollywood heavyweights as Halle Berry and Julianne Moore,
and in 2005 she re-connected with Reeves for the superhero action flick
Constantine.
But it was her role in another film that year that earned Weisz her first
Academy Award: she was cast as the mysterious and maddening Tessa Quayle
in
The Constant Gardener,
based on espionage-thriller author John le Carré's novel of
the same name. The plot centers around her murder, and the quest her
diplomat husband Justin (Ralph Fiennes) embarks upon to ferret out the
truth. Their unlikely romance is told in flashback, as is Tessa's
involvement in unmasking nefarious pharmaceutical-company misdeeds in
Kenya.

The Constant Gardener
won laudatory reviews as well as some industry honors. "Weisz
makes it easy to believe Tessa's fearlessness," declared
Entertainment Weekly
's Lisa Schwarzbaum. "She's as mobile, open-faced,
and sexually alive as Fiennes is shuttered, and the two make a potent
couple." Her Oscar win was preceded by a Golden Globe award, each
in the best actress in a supporting role category, and Weisz accepted her
Academy Award visibly pregnant, a development she had been forced to
announce just a few weeks earlier as a guest on
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
She had been romantically involved with director Darren Aronofsky (
Requiem for a Dream
), since 2001, and the two were engaged to be married. Weisz gave birth to
their son on May 31, 2006.

In 2006, Aronofsky was busy finishing work on
The Fountain,
a science-fiction thriller he directed that starred Weisz and Hugh
Jackman. The three-part epic was set in sixteenth-century Spain, the
present, and the future, and it was the first time Weisz had worked with
her fiancé. Journalists often asked her if any tensions arose from
being forced to combine their personal and professional lives, but Weisz
ventured only that it was "great to watch someone at work,"
she told Eimer, the
Sunday Times
interviewer. "I don't know if he feels the same. I guess he
does. I don't get any special treatment."